Food For Thought

I'd come home from work, tired and cranky and in no mood to cook. My shelves were depressingly bare except for a cinnamon raisin bagel. Not interested in waiting for take out, I figured that there were worse things I could eat for dinner than that blessed food usually reserved for Sunday mornings when I set up camp with the Week in Review and Jonathan Schwartz gabbing away on the radio--a Terrace Bagel. Terrace bagels are so good, even my two housemates have sworn loyalty to them over their childhood favorite, the acclaimed H & H. But that particular bagel was never meant to be my dinner, because while slicing it open, I apparently forgot how to use a knife correctly. The serrated edge slid into the fleshy side of my left pointer finger, deeply enough that when I paused in shock, it stayed stuck there. When I finally pulled it out, blood blossomed all over the place--so much for dinner. After running some cold water over the mangled appendage, then wrapping it up in a paper towel, I was dismayed to see that I quickly bled through the towel. The way this thing was spurting, I was probably going to need stitches. That meant a hospital. Standing in my Brooklyn kitchen, haphazardly spattered with blood and arms raised up above my head in a pathetic attempt to get the damn thing to stop gushing, I wondered... How do people in New York get to the hospital?

I live with two natural born New Yorkers, while I myself grew up in California. Though no stranger to Manhattan, this past year has been my first year as someone who properly lives here, not just as someone who merely hangs out while a member of the family is working, or as a college student who pops down for the weekend from Poughkeepsie. Like a Padawan learner and her Jedi Masters, I've tried hard to follow my housemates's advice on how best to expedite the process of becoming that venerated figure: a real New Yorker. There wasn't a clear-cut list of things I needed to do, or witness, or have inflicted upon my person, but as the months went by I had several breakthrough moments, all of which brought me a shameful amount of joy. Occasionally Lizzie would comment, "Yeah, well, that's a real New Yorker moment," before turning back to the paper. Then there was that time Anika patted me on the back for pushing a tourist in Midtown out of my way, "like a real New Yorker." Through the winter I had a couple of key moments: the classic long, dramatic and emotionally devastating conversation on a stoop somewhere at an ungodly hour in the morning; the first time I bought a Christmas tree on a street corner, instead of a spacious lot; or more benignly, the first time someone asked me for directions, and I actually knew what to tell them. Then, two weeks ago, I had another moment: I sliced my finger open while cutting a bagel. Twenty-four hours later, as I was perched on an examination table, a doctor asked me what kind of bagel I'd ruined. He chuckled, and held up his own palm and pointed to a pearly line bisecting his thumb, "Mine was onion. Welcome to the club."

But back to the dilemma at hand: how was I going to get to the hospital? It sounds like a stupid question. It is a stupid question. But when your hand is going like a spigot and your trusty doyennes of city know-how are gone, and if you're of a slightly melodramatic personality, the situation quickly becomes a debacle. Surely I wasn't supposed to get on the subway like this? One of the reasons I love living in New York is public transportation. Yes, it can get a little disgusting--especially in these lovely triple-digit degree days, not to mention any given night in any season on the F train home. Nonetheless, I love that I don't own a car. That I get 45 minutes of reading time in the morning. That after four years in L.A. driving for an hour and a half when it should only take me twenty minutes, here I can count on getting where I need to be in a reasonable amount of time. (Er, unless they're doing construction and the F is running on the G line and the L is down.) But even if the trains were running regularly on this summer's Wednesday night, it didn't seem, well, kosher to hop on the train in the state I was in. So, a taxi became the best option. If I lived in Manhattan, that'd be no problem, but I happen to live in Brooklyn, and in residential Brooklyn no less (not so much hipsters as matronly lesbians and their nine kids). I wonder what my bedraggled neighbor was thinking as she shuffled by in her mumu, slightly aghast as I sat on my stoop, griping a bloodied cell phone and waiting for a hired car, arm still raised over my head. Nothing flattering, I'm sure.

Upon arrival at the ER, I instantly realized that I had made a mistake. A white girl with a bagel wound was not going to be particularly high on anyone's list of things to take care of. Then again, it didn't seem like much of anything would rouse the three people lounging behind a desk in the packed waiting room. A guy whose face looked like it was pummeled with a baseball bat stood next to me, both of us confused and waiting for someone to offer us a seat, or a form to fill out, or at least fresh towels for our disparate wounds. He had way more of an overflow problem, by the way, which makes sense since I later overheard the gentleman talking with some policemen about how he actually was pummeled with a baseball bat. Swallowing a healthy dose of reality, I left before filling out anything or talking to anyone and took my own bedraggled self home, arm slung low in defeat and well-deserved embarrassment. My finger, which had finally slowed down to a trickle, could wait until the next morning, when I popped into a doctor's office. After a slow walk in the Brooklyn night air, I pushed open the door to see Lizzie, my wise housemate, waiting with some hydrogen peroxide and a shoulder to soak up my self-pity. Once I gathered myself together a bit, we realized neither of us had band-aids. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll just ask the people downstairs." Like you do, here in New York. So now I've got a new scar and another box checked on my New Yorker list. It's right next to my grocery list that reads:

"GET MORE BAGELS."